Sound in the Silence 2024

About

Sound in the Silence is an interdisciplinary remembrance project aimed at encouraging high school students from around Europe to actively reflect on the difficult aspects of the 20th century history with the use of artistic means.

Drawing on their reflections and emotional reactions to what they will come to learn there, young students will work together with professional artists to create a performance based on acting, dance, music and creative writing.

While the pupils learn about the site's past and work on the final performance, their teachers will take part in workshops on interdisciplinary ways of teaching history so as to exchange experiences with peers from different countries.

Where?
Bucharest and Pitești, Romania
This year, four groups composed of one teacher and seven students each, will first meet in Bucharest, where they will learn about the Romanian 20th-century history, including the First and the Second World Wars, the communist period and the Ceaușescu era. After this, they will move to the former prison in Pitești, which was a scene of one of the most cruel ‘reeducation’ experiments in the modern world, carried out between 1949 and 1951.

When?
5–13 October, 2024

Call for applications

1. Before applying, please read:

Rules governing the recruitment
The information clause regarding the processing of personal data

2. Fill out the application form here

Please remember that an incomplete online application form cannot be saved. We recommend that you prepare your answers offline and then copy and paste them into the online application form.

During this year’s edition of Sound in the Silence we will visit Bucharest and the former Pitești prison, where we will learn
about Romanian 20th-century history.

After World War II, Romania was occupied by the Soviet army. The general elections of 1946 brought the Communist Party
to power and King Michael I was forced to abdicate in 1947. The newly proclaimed Romanian People’s Republic
followed the Soviet model, establishing the Department of State Security (Securitate) to brutally suppress
any opposition against communist values.

The repressions resulted in hundreds of thousands of political prisoners and soaring waves of state terror. One of the most
dramatic chapters was the Pitești “re-education experiment,” described by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Soviet dissident,
Nobel Prize winner and the author of the acclaimed “The Gulag Archipelago,” as “the most terrible act of barbarism
in the contemporary world.”

Between 1949 and 1951, an inconspicuous complex of buildings on the northern outskirts of the city of Pitești,
120 km northwest of Bucharest, became a scene of a special re-education programme. Apart from interrogations,
the inmates of the prison, mostly university students, were subjected to round-the-clock physical and psychological
torture aimed at depriving them of their identity and bringing them to the point of absolute obedience. Perhaps the most
shocking part about this “experiment” was the fact that prisoners were tortured by other prisoners.

The Pitești penitentiary continued operating until 1977. In 2014, a part of its premises were turned into a memorial museum,
run by the Pitești Prison Memorial Foundation.

Setting the Stage

Dan Wolf

It all started with a song…

read

Video

Artists

Dan Wolf

PROJECT ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOPS

Dan Wolf is a hip-hop artist who works with rap, theater, personal narrative, and history to give voice to the problematic world we live in. His multi-sensory work draws its power from years of experience working, teaching, and performing with the critically acclaimed hip-hop music and theatre collective Felonious. His debut album “Blood and Bones, Skin and Scars” is a fearless exploration of ideals, values, and vulnerability, and marks his debut as a solo hip-hop musician. His projects have traveled all around the world from concert halls to museums to schools and memorial sites where he engages history and culture as a prompt to make vital music and theater that can only live in this moment. He is a Resident Playwright at the Playwright Foundation in San Francisco and is the co-founder of the Bay Area Theatre Cypher, a collective of performers who live on the cross fader of hip hop, theater, activism, and community.

Katarina Rampackova

DANCING WORKSHOPS

Kat Rampackova is a choreographer, performer and dance activist. She graduated from the Swiss University of Physical Theater - Scuola Teatro Dimitri and subsequently graduated with a master of choreography at HAMU in Prague. She currently lives in Barcelona, where she deepens her dance education in contact improvisation and the somatic work - Body Mind Centering. She has dedicated herself to contemporary dance for 22 years. As a choreographer, she has been involved in the international interdisciplinary project Sound in the Silence since 2016. She also works as a teacher and choreographer at the Italian school Danzaria in Montevarchi. She specializes in site-specific performances, inclusive dance and creation of author performances. Together with Michaela Sabolova, they lead PST - Space of Contemporary Dance in Kosice, which, in addition to educational activities, produces performances, organizes an annual festival called MOVE Fest, where Kat is in charge of dramaturgy of the festival.

Sean Palmer

MUSIC WORKSHOP

Sean Palmer (1977) trained in theatre and arts in Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He moved to PL permanently in 2008 and speaks Polish. He has been a part of the Warsaw theatre and performance scene since 2000 traversing night clubs to national museums, Ancient Greek musical reconstruction to Broken Beat MC, Edinburgh fringe theatre to National Opera, performing the avant-garde Neanderthal to Philip Glass. He is an active creator, collaborator and educator. Between 2010 and 2020 he ran his own experimental choir - GRE BADANIE - exploring the boundaries of sound and energy as a carrier of meaning. 2014 - 2018 he was the resident artistic director/conductor of the POLIN museum community choir which performed original content concerts twice a year connected to current exhibitions. Currently (2022) he is co-running MONT - a youth orchestra in Warsaw, leading a course called multivoice at the University of Warsaw and collaborates with the Museum of Contemporary Art leading short term choral projects. Sean is not a trained musician, but has found himself composing for theatre, dance and choirs as well as singing and recording in multifarious settings. Since 2015 he is the front man of the White Kites (Missing, Devillusion) and jazz trio William’s Things (William’s Things, A Heart Not all of Wood, The Robots are Coming). The major through line in his work is musicality or sounding. The search for the thing which can move us together regardless if it is a beat, a note a yelp or a growl, because sound can often go where words fail. Every day Sean works as VO artist from his studio in Warsaw. Apart from all the above ‘arty stuff’, he’s also a dad, a husband, has two kids, two cats, loves running and doesn’t eat animals.

Educators

Tetiana Kriukovska

facilitator of group dynamics

Tetiana Kriukovska was born and raised Donetsk, Ukraine, where she worked as a filmmaker. After the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 she founded the NGO Tolerance in You, which organises exchange programs for young people from Germany, Poland and Ukraine and which trains international educators who want to specialise in the topic of war. Tetiana moved to Germany in March 2022, where she worked as a project coordinator for the Ukrainian-Polish-German education network LIKHTAR at the educational institute in Bredbeck. Tetiana’s expertise includes filmmaking, international youth work, moderation in non-formal education and intercultural dialogue. Her long-time experience of working with youth in a sensitive and creative way makes her an excellent educator. During the Sound in the Silence project, Tetiana will be responsible for ensuring the participants’ wellbeing, offering them tools to reflect and focus on personal feelings towards what they have learnt. She will also facilitate collaboration and group dynamics. Her dream is to organise Sound in the Silence in Ukraine one day, fostering a new culture of remembrance of the war in her country.

Partners

Organiser

Partners

ENRS is funded by: